VoIP Insider

101 Things You Can Do With Asterisk (and more)!

Asterisk is More Than Just a Phone System

Over the last nine years Asterisk has emerged as world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit, however most people simply know it as an open source phone system. Over the last five years that we have been involved in the Asterisk community, we have heard of dozens of different things that people are using Asterisk for or have done with Asterisk.

Personally, I can think of about 25 things (don’t worry I am not competing) that I have heard people do with Asterisk and as the visibility and viability of open source communications continues to grow, more and more applications and uses are coming out each and every day. In a effort to have a little fun and to catalog the many uses and applications of Asterisk, VoIP Supply has partnered with Digium, the creators of Asterisk, to run a contest here on the VoIP Insider to find 101 things you can do with Asterisk.

101 Things You Can Do With Asterisk Rules and Details

The premise is simple.

After reading the rest of this post, simply place a comment below that details a unique use or application of Asterisk that you have had a hand in using/deploying or one that you know of (duplicate instances will be deleted).

When we hit 101 things that you can do with Asterisk, we will pick one winner at random for a $1,500.00 VoIP Supply shopping spree (store credit) sponsored by Digium and VoIP Supply.

So what are you waiting for?

Let’s hear what you or someone else has done with Asterisk!

Update: Due to an overwhelming response, we are extending the contest until Friday of this week. Let’s see how many unique uses for Asterisk we can document!

Update: the contest is now closed. Our winner was Ashley Kitto. For more information visit our follow-up post.

Discussion

Develop and host a virtual telephone contest. Nationwide contest, run multiple weeks and multiple times per day set to the atomic clock. Specific caller wins I.E. the 101st caller – YOU win!, call record the happy winner, and patch the winner to the local radio station in one of the 50 states the call came into. Also, record the runner-up and 3rd place winner for each contest. All while you watch and see the calls online. Fun and Cool Stuff.

Integrate with SMS content platform so when an SMS is sent with a special keyword, a call-back from Asterisk is initiated to the sender of the SMS and the content associated with the keyword is played back for them.

Using Asterisk you can create a virtual hunt group for your city or club. We built ServiceGuy initially for pool guys. The pool guy enters his phone number in our system, a consumer calls our citywide pool guy number and all pool guys in the system are called at the same time. Consumers get to talk to someone immediately, pool guys get incremental business. Win-Win. http://www.serviceguy.org

Provide private number service – where calls to a special number are re-routed to personal phone number of the service user. Hence not necessitating the service user to disclose their personal phone number.

Integrate Asterisk, Hylafax and Redfone’s TDMoE to replace our 3rd party fax provider, saving us over $3000/month in fax charges. We even wrote a webservice in front of Hylafax that emulates our previous fax provider so we didn’t need to change our application code.

Interface Asterisk with my HomeSeer home automation system to originate calls to me for various alarm or trouble conditions. I use the same interface to announce incoming caller-ID over the home paging system.

Use Asterisk and the Custom-Contexts modules in FreePBX to support a vacation home and provide the full richness of Asterisk features 150 miles from the server. I’m able to provide local E911 via the custom-contexts module.

Provide softphone and PC camera to remote customer technical contact. Long distance and international customers can now call a four digit extension to speak with and see a helpdesk technician. The camera can also be used to help our technician better understand an equipment problem

Create an emergency notification system for the campus classrooms using Asterisk and Snom phones. Scripts call all of the registered phones and play an emergency announcement through the speakerphone like a page. Features include auto-recall if the announcement isn’t acknowledged or there was a failed call, and notification of such failures to campus police. System is also used to provide 911 service.

One of the neatest things I’ve been doing which always makes a good impression is to
recognize the inbound Caller-ID and give a custom treatment to the call.

For example, when John is calling from either his cell, office, or home phone, he’s greeted with an announcement “good john!”, and directly transferred to the person he always want to talk to. When Bill the CEO is calling, then all manager phones are ringing so that he gets an immediate answer. But when anyone else is calling, they go through the regular voice prompts.

integrate it with a php front end so that the person on call this week sets their status as “oncall”, thus forwarding all after hours call to the person who is “oncall”, rather than the person having to carry a on call pager or the company having to maintain one.

You can also setup the system to call another tech if the first person doesnt answer.

Integrate phone support with our internal ticket system. When a client calls support, they input their client number and a secret pin number. From there, we list their current products, and they choose which one they’re having an issue with. Then we automatically add a support ticket for that client/product, and add them to our queue; when the support person gets their call, they can see what website it’s for on their caller id.

Implement a receptionist in/out functionality so that when receptionist is in – general calls go to her, but when she isn’t general calls go to everybody. Allowing quick response to all calls, but minimizing disruption to everybody when receptionist is in.

Assign a ring group to every one who needs to stay in contact but is on the go instead of an extension. Then put their desk phone, soft phone and using the # parameter their cell number in the ring group. Then when someone enters their ring group number ( which would be the published extension number on their business card ). The caller would be put through.

Use one Asterisk to manage multiple businesses in one physical location. Users can be completely segregated. Use DIDs to manage routing of calls and even notify receptionist which business is being called.

Using Asterisk you can very cheaply and easily run a sports-picking hotline.

If you are good a picking the winning team before a sports game, you can sell your picks to subscribers over the hotline. Your prepaid members will have a pin number that they enter and will then be able to hear picks from their selected categories.

bridge church audio system service to freeconferencecall.com and record it so the people that missed the service can call and listen later – agi interface to put the last 10 conference call recording in a menu so the listener can choose which service to listen to.

Created a fanless solid state home PBX system that integrates to the office PBX. distinctive ringing if it is a office call. also forwards calls to cell phone and displays modified caller id depending what prompt is selected

Use an Astribank connected to your Asterisk with some dialplan programming to receive notification when a doorbell is pressed and then the contact closure of the Astribank to operate the electric unlock mechanism.

We have a system monitoring package running in our server room that monitors the status of our servers, the software running on those servers and the logging messages from our servers and networking hardware. It is set to call astersisk which in turn runs an agi script to parse a system status website. Then depending on the severity of the situtation asterisk will either execute a script specific to fixing the problem or call our system administrator and informing them that there is a problem, what the problem is, and what location it is at.

Gas powered generator running a small form factor PC running Asterisk using satellite to make emergency calls during disaster situations. Good for when cell phone towers are down or overloaded and backup power is down and even backup-backup power is down.

We have installed asterisk at our hospital and have developed a disaster drill-down calling list. If a disaster happens a user simply dials the extension of the drill-down and all the important people are called and left a pre-recorded message to report to work asap.
(We used to have to manually call all those people)

Used asterisk to bridge using H323 signalling between an Avaya Definity PBX in a call center and a Spectel/Avaya conference bridge in a colo to provide VOIP voicepaths (Not on revenue ports) for operators in a call center for a conferencing provider.

Asterisk, Bash and Cron as a Supervisory System: Use Asterisk with cron and a simple bash script to monitor an ISP 802.11Link and phone the technical support in case a failure occurs or in case predefined parametres are not met.

Created a “digital replay” system to have an end user call in with an access code and pin to hear an archived conference call recording. Alternatively gathering voice prompts from the end user for later processing. (Please say your name/company name, etc..)

Floating receptionist: Different people act as receptionist at different times, and they simply log in and log out as they are available. This keeps from having all phones rign and disturb everyone, yet the calls are handled well

A large financial institution came to us with a problem. How can we get our customers to their loan counselors the most efficiently? A Cisco distributer quoted them $500,000 for 25 phones and an IVR system. With Asterisk we were able to to price at just over $20,000 with programming. The programming allowed us to do all the standard database query IVR events to determine which loan went to which customer. However it also allowed us to build custom reports with the MySQL integration to show the time spent with each customer. Furthermore we have all the phones callerids set using a LDAP query to the originators Active Directory user database.

If that is not enough, unlike other telephone systems we can monitor the status of the extensions, PRI, system load, etc by using Nagios to alert us to any problems. No other PBX comes close to this functionality for the price.

I replaced a Comdial system with Asterisk at a $9M company experiencing 200% annual growth. It saved our call center $250K the first year in long distance bills and costly upgrades to the legacy system. In one month, we took 16,000 calls and talked 777 hours. Asterisk allowed us to easily scale at ridiculous rates, while providing great metrics- so we could plan for staffing and adding network capacity.

A patient notification system whereas a doctor would dial into the system and record a message for a patient which will then call out to the patient at specified intervals until the message is heard/acknowledged. They are prompted for their pin code prior to playing the message due to privacy issues. The patient is provided a card with the dial in instructions/pin codes to access their information.

Created a speech recognition interface to a home automation system (yeah the home automation folks are here en-masse), but I can tell my Asterisk to make me coffee in the morning, and it asks me what time I’d like it ready.
I also used a conference bridge as a baby monitor, accessible from any IAX device worldwide, so I was able to hear my infant son fuss when I was out-of-country, and page my wife in the next room.

Setup several little features to make our phones much more useful and cost effective. Including a call-in and back out system to avoid high cost international calls from our cell phones and making an 800 number forward to our house / work / cell so that we can be reached wherever we are in case of emergency.

I created a simple but effective “reminder” application. You dial the reminder line, follow the prompts to indicate how frequently you want to be reminded (once, every x mns, daily, weekly, yearly, etc…) and you then record a 30s max message to indicate what you need to remember.

Asterisk will then call you as frequently as you requested to remind you of your task; and offer a “snooze” option to stop reminders for a certain period of time, and a
“stop” option to disable the reminder (just this reminder or all of them).

Snow day announcement. Via web page, enter user authentication, pick schools affected, and pre-recorded message to play. Asterisk will call, play recording to quickly inform students/families, that either school is closed or schol is open but buses are not running. ( I know is a Canadian thing )

I did this when I was starting out with asterisk. Get a POTS number, and have it call your extension, but leave a two second window for you to hit the # key. Then ask for a passcode and throw you into DISA.

We use Asterisk for our PSTN gateways – PRI’s come in and SIP comes out. The work great, and allow us to route calling easily around our network. Plus we have built-in redundancy using multiple gateways.

My second favorite function is the vmNAG – we POP the headers from folks VMails (separate vm server) and if the vm has not been listened to for a certain amount of time (say 4 minutes in the case of an emergency vmbox) then we auto-dial out to a series of numbers until one connects. The person who connects presses “1” and they hear the vm that has waited (and not been responded to by the person on call…)

Broadcast dialer capable of doing answering machine detection to detect human. The dialer is capable to transfer the potential client to a live agent if the potential customer press a key. The agent can be an external phone number or a SIP agent.

The setup was tested on up to 8 PRI and with up to 300 SIP trunks dialing simultaneously.

Link Asterisk and an an Instant Messaging platform to allow inbound calls to be routed via IVR first, then to only ring phones of users in a department that are broadcasting a particular presence; i.e. “Available”.

Customers can call in and enter a ticket number to check status, and have the most recent entry “read” to them over the phone. Hear automated network status messages based on monitoring scripts/Nagios/Etc. These same monitoring systems can initiate alert calls to engineers or VIP customers to inform them of possible downtime or interruption in service. Customers can open a new support ticket by leaving a voice message and get their ticket number before hanging up, or if they want to speak with someone, it can be transfered to multiple employees cell-phones or home phones so they can work at home. If nobody answers, it can be sent to a voicemail box which can be sent to multiple email addresses or forwarded to an answering service. Employees at home can dial in and access DISA to return calls so your customer sees the callerID of your company instead of your employees private number.

From the customers standpoint, you have a very well organized tightly connected local office – when in fact you have people located in different places around the country or world answering phone calls and managing their services remotely – all the time saving your company a lot of expenses!

At my work we have a ride on train. Asterisk is made to do the overhead announcements at set intervals.. ie 10min, 5min, and 1min. Our cashier can also check how much time is remaining by dialing a certain extension. Our train goes out on time much more often now.

I have T-mobile Favs so I get free cell calls to/from 5 numbers. I have my asterisk box be one of those numbers. I setup a a DISA in Freepbx so that it drops me to a dial tone when I call from my cell phone. Then I just change my dial plan on my cell phone from dialing 1 before my number to dial my “pbx’s phone number comma 1” Then I just dial my cell phone like normal! Instant unlimited cell minutes. Of course I pay for it on my PBX, but that is much cheaper then cell minutes.

When a phone call comes in the first person often uses the computer at their desk to help the caller. At some point, should it become necessary to redirect the call to someone else, redirecting the call is a no brainer. What should also happen is the session that was started on the computer needs to be redirected with the call to the person who takes up helping the caller. If the session and call were redirected then the person who picks up the call would have the last screen the previous person used to help the caller their in a window at their desk as well as the session history should it be helpful to go back a couple screens to help the caller.

Created an extension where user can call in and press any key from 2,4,6,8. Accordingly one box on the webpage would move top,left,down or right. This was made possible by using Ajax,mysql,dhtml sprites. Eventually, a two player game was setup where each other would try to find way out path from a maze.

When my son went off to college, we tied his dorm room into Asterisk through a VPN tunnel. Not only does this make calls back and forth between us easy (and free), but it also lets him talk to his girlfriend overseas without hitting Dad with a huge phone bill. If they had only had this back in the ’70s I wouldn’t have had to…oh, wait, what’s the statute of limitations on phone freaking?

I added a GSM gateway to my Asterisk server so that I could leverage free mobile-to-mobile calling. When I’m traveling, which is a lot these days, I call the gateway which rings my home IP phones through my server. Zero cost, un-metered minutes from T-Mobile.

Have Asterisk call you on your cell phone, when you get a voicemail message, skipping voicemail login, because it already knows who you are, instead of requiring you to poll on a regular basis as to whether you have voicemail back at the office.

The first feature I added to Asterisk was one I used at home (idea was prompted by a user on IRC). Ever heard of ringback tones? I made it so that you can use “midi notes” in indications/Playtones to play “music” back to the caller in early media (without answering).

I have used Asterisk to reclaim my life and my privacy. As more bottom feeder telemarketers have realized that they can simply ignore the do not call registry with little risk to themselves, and with the many sham charities and politicians who take advantage of their respective loopholes, nuisance calls are diminished, but not gone from our lives. I have health problems that sometimes make responding to such calls more of a burden that one might ordinarily expect. Now nuisance callers simply find themselves cast into the lower levels of telephone hell, where they belong, and my phone only rings when it is a legitimate call. Asterisk has been a blessing that has made my life, and my family’s life, better. Not very commercial, I know, but if it were up to me, every home would have an Asterisk appliance, kept up to date over the Internet from a database of nuisance callers. Seems like a good product for somebody to bring to market.

I used to have Asterisk call two friends, with the callerid of each call set as the phone number of the other person. Then, I would listen to the confusion when they both answered for my own amusement.

Using Asterisk and a Pure Data server wired to five stage lights, we created a system where the audience of a show could call in and with the press of a digit, interact with the stage lighting patterns.

I have used asterisk to integrate my home telephones with jukebox software on another server in my house so that any phone can start, stop and pause the jukebox, skip to the next song, have asterisk playback the currently playing song information.

I worked at a place with a simple voice mail system that only did outcall notification by phone. I created an AGI that would receive the call and then email a note saying that I had VM. I also created a simple web page that would let people sign up for an ID, so that they could use it too.
Sean

My asterisk box is hosted on a tiny VPS in Washington, USA. I have dial in numbers (DIDs) from Israel, France and the USA, and soon Australia too.

Calls coming in to the box get routed to both my soft phone (wherever my laptop may be) and my cellphone via a termination service (ATM a US cellphone but I changed that to an Israeli cellphone when I was in Israel and soon an Australian cellphone when I move to Australia).

Friends and family know the numbers and call me locally, regardless of which country I’m in at the moment.

I’m thinking of adding a script that will play a recording in the times when I sleep (depends on the local time) to let people know that they will wake me up if they stay on the line.

Oh, when I call the numbers, asterisks identifies me by my caller ID and a passcode and lets me dial out internationally.

Build an after-hours call tool that checks maintenance based on caller id or a dial-pad friendly maintenance number. If the user is allowed access to 24×7 maintenance, a voicemail can be left and forwarded to the on-call engineer…

I´m building an Asterisk system as a family switchboard. It will have local telephone numbers from everywhere we have family (even internationally), so we can call each other as extensions, making local calls all over and peoply can call us at any of the telephones we give them. A DISA will direct callers to the respective family, then the person of that family, options such as mobil, work, home, VOIP or voicemail.

Develop an Surveillance System with a Camera with a Asterisk connected to a land line. So if some movement is detected at night (or day) inside your house, make an emergency call to your cell phone to notify you about an intruder inside your house.

We are in Hawaii, and many people don’t understand the time difference. We use Asterisk after hours to inform calllers of the local time and ask them to enter ‘911’ if they really need to talk to us after business hours.

1. Hook an IP based AudioSpot speaker to Asterisk, and install it at the whaling wall in Jerusalem.
2. Create a uni-directional prayer facility, enabling people to use the speaker to pray at the whaling wall from anywhere in the world.
3. Publish DID numbers around the world and let people come into the system.
4. Sit back and enjoy the fact that you’ve done a really nice and cool thing.

In the UK we suffer from premium rate calls deemed “National” or “Lo-Call” numbers ALL prohibitively more expensive than geo national or geo local. I am currently integrating a database of known offending numbers and their TRUE geo IDs using Asterisk to automatically look up the number thus in many cases negating cost altogether, the database owner gets to play a quick “wav”/Ditty to let you know the wonderful miracle is happening each and every time – our ideas and methods are of course copyrighted!

Simply replace the stupid and annoying voice mail that my cell phone provider overcharges for with a voice mail that I have full control over, that stores incoming messages on my disk, and that notifies me both by email AND sms when a voicemail comes in.

Here are some things I have implemented in the last year and a half as a VoIP Engineer.

1. Conf. based recording system that has (to date) recorded over 250,000 verification transactions.

2. Click-to-call for users to pull up their custom internal webpage and paste numbers to dial. Asterisk calls the user’s extension, then calls the number they pasted. The users can also store favorite numbers for 1-click calling.

3. Pay-by-phone credit card application that I personally developed.

4. I developed a SMS system that will (based on the caller’s input) text message directions to the callers phone.

5. Installed 4 instances of GNUdialer for callcenters.

6. Scheduled automatic conference calls initiated by the server at specified intervals during the week.

When a caller calls in and punch in their password, asterisk put the caller on hold and start dialing our people one-by-one. When/if they answer, they are prompted to accept or reject the call. Should they reject, te next person is called, etc..

No need for a live person to wait for call and manually dialing our team when an emergency arise; and no need to let the callers know all cell phone numbers.

I have a few custom extensions set up that when called, run an agi (perl) script that downloads a particular podcast and plays it (a different one for each extension). So I dial the number, hear a couple rings (while it is downloading the podcast and converting it to a form that Asterisk can play), and then I can hear the news, weather, or whatever. Works best on podcasts of about five minutes or less (depending, of course, on your broadband download speed, and your tolerance for listening to a recording over the telephone!). Best part is since you are dowloading these from the Internet you are not incurring any per-minute charges on your outbound routes.

I use Asterisk as a means of dialing a SIP URL. Asterisk, MySQL, and Apache are on my Ubuntu Dectop firewall which runs from a 4 gig USB flash drive. I use Snom IP phones which allow for dialing a SIP URL from their internal web pages. I programmed my Asterisk dialplan to have a SIP URL active either temporarily or permanent.

Ok, I’m not expecting this to be a winner but since we’re sharing I wanted to pass along an Asterisk based killer ROI application in production today.

We installed Asterisk running on a Sun Microsystems box that is basically a web site for accepting on-line loan payments, an internal web site with a customer service group behind it accepting loans payments and an IVR accepting loan payments all writing to the same MySQL db.

The total dev cost including all hardware and software came to roughly $10,000.00. This system is in production and consistently accepts an average of $24,000.00 in payments daily Monday through Friday and around $8,000.00 over the weekend.

you can use asterisk as a interphone for houses or buildings, that means if you are not in house the person who come can live you a message and an instant page will advice you, even you can make it with an extention on your office even with video, as always asterisk is the best

An IVR to tell you all the results from the lottery, where you can choose all the results from an especific date, extracting the results from a Database using ODBC functions and internal applications only, no AGI ou AMI involved.

Find unique ways to make free calls using existing services – for example, if you sign up for Gizmo5 you can make free outbound calls to customers of certain cell phone companies (Verizon is one) – it plays a short (five second) message at the start of the call but that’s fine when calling friends and family members if it means I’m not burning minutes on a commercial VoIP service. As a bonus, anyone can call you from any of the Sipbroker PSTN numbers around the world by calling their local Sipbroker number, then dialing *747-1-747-xxx-xxxx (where 1-747-xxx-xxxx is your Gizmo5 number). Sometimes it takes a little searching the web to figure out how to do this stuff but on a home system that’s part of the fun!

Make a family intercom system, so that any family member that has broadband service and a VoIP adapter (or a softphone) can call any other family member just by picking up that phone and dialing two or three digits. Of course, if you have an outgoing PSTN or commercial VoIP trunk, you can do interesting things like ringing their extension and their cell phone simultaneously, so that they get the call on whichever one they pick up first!

Let’s see… what have I done or helped people do with asterisk:
– use my cell phone as a phone extension
– use my asterisk box to pick up cell phone calls
– SMS my cell phone when I have new home or business voicemail
– dial mine, my wife’s, both, or neither of our cell phones when someone calls the house based on time of day and who called
– prevent the house phones from ringing during meals or family time unless it is from a whitelisted caller and they specify that it’s urgent
– select which cell phone/pager to call after-hours based on an outlook calendar
– route the company number to a cluster of cell phones so we can all enjoy our company golf tournament
– pop up customer data and journal when they call in
– record every single incoming, outgoing and internal call and fax, storing the call audio in an easily archiveable and retrievable database which is cross-referenced with the corporate contact list for sarbanes-oaxley compliance

I think that’s a good set… probably a few more in there yet that I’ve forgotten…

6 Asterisk PBX servers and up to 1,500 IP phones are being deployed for the Town of Manchester, CT. The new phone system, which is spread out over 44 buildings, will serve all of the town’s schools, administrative offices, police and fire departments. This is the largest deployment to date of an open source PBX for a municipal government within the U.S.

According to Jack McCoy, Manchester’s CIO, the town will save almost $200,000 per year by having Softel replace the existing Centrex system with Asterisk. The town chose Asterisk over competitive products like Cisco Call Manager for 3 main reasons. First, the cost to deploy Asterisk was less than half that of other proprietary PBX systems. Second, the town did not want to be tied to a single vendor for the IP phones. Asterisk supports a wide variety of SIP phones from different vendors, ranging in price from $85 to $500. Finally, Manchester needed some custom applications developed such as Enhanced 911 service and mass automated dialing with pre-recorded announcements (e.g., school closing announcements). Asterisk’s open source platform makes it easy to rapidly develop these kinds of applications. Softel’s team was able to develop the 911 software according to Manchester’s requirements within a few weeks.

Shortly after the installation, load tests were performed using 150 soft phones, and all tests were successful. Thousands of calls were completed successfully within the course of a few hours. The system is also highly reliable and completely fault tolerant. If any PBX server goes down, calls are automatically re-routed to one of the other servers. Softel also provided a graphical management application called SigMAN (developed by Signate), which made it easy for Manchester’s technical personnel to set up the system and add users.

The system provides advanced features that are not available with Centrex. For example, users can access their voice mails via their email. Also, the system has a built-in conference bridge which allows dozens of people to participate in a conference call at once.

Bring back the “Time Lady” – you can use an Asterisk dial plan and the voice of Allison to say something like, “At the sound of the tone, the time will be exactly 8:49 and 50 seconds. BEEP” And you don’t even need a big old Audicron machine to do it!

Make your friends think they have entered the Twilight Zone – If you use FreePBX with Asterisk, you can have it play Music on Hold when ringing an extension, instead of the normal ringing signal. But you can specify a specific class of Music On Hold, and who says that has to actually be music? There are sites on the web that have recordings make by “phone phreaks” back in the 1960’s that have all sorts of interesting sounds, including things like old General Telephone and Independent company ringback tones. Use a sound editor to make up a recoding of about 90 to 180 seconds of that ringing and use THAT as your “music.” Then tell your friends you moved to Hooterville, and when they try to call you and hear that ringback tone, they may think you’ve really landed in the last place on earth that still uses equipment that old! Admittedly this has the greatest appeal on April 1, or with friends who are real phone geeks!

(I only wish I could find a recording somewhere of the old GTE ringing tone they used to use in these parts, that sounded exactly like someone was blasting several fog horns, all at different pitches, right into your ear! )

An Asterisk dialing application which called a listing of police officers serially until one accepts the special duty assignment (overtime). When they accept it connects them to their supervisor for information. To keep things fair, it remembers where it left off in the list so the same officer doesn’t always get the time.

Use ENUM to save money on calls – I don’t think anyone has mentioned it yet, but more and more VoIP compaines (especially the smaller ones) and businesses are registering their numbers with an ENUM registry, so that if you check ENUM first when making a call, you will be able to send calls to them entirely via VoIP, without ever sending the call to the PSTN. I only wish this concept would gain a lot more traction – it is stupid for one VoIP company to send a call to a customer of another VoIP company via the PSTN simply because some companies won’t enable any way for outside calls to come in directly via IP.

We built an customer satisfaction survey system for a restaurant chain. They printed unique numbers on every receipt with identifying information. Customers could then call in and rate their experience.

I have installed a fully functional Call Center on a laptop to do fund raising with Soft phone for a political meeting.
Answer a call in a specific language based on the incoming channel DID (33X. answers in French, 1X. answers in English)

Make it so that when a parent calls into the school and they dial an extension they will either ring the teachers desk phone or go to there voicemail depending on if they are teaching a class or not. Asterisk queries the Student Information System to see the teachers teaching schedule.

I created a php database which integrates into our Asterisk box. When I click on a users phone number in our database, our Asterisk server first dials the extension of the person that just click on the phone number (in this example, me), then it calls the number that was click on…connecting the call without having to dial.

We have created an application to handle intercoms on a carpark. The interphone calls Asterisk which park it, and dial the distant phone playing it a voice message containing which intercom and park is calling, then the man can press * and talk to the people waiting before the intercom.
Asterisk is intefaced with an application which allow the operator to press some digits to open the barrier, close the barrier, and do anything that we may need to do… We aim to implement video support too^^

Resuce – if you’re stuck in a boring meeting get your asterisk server to call you and bail you out. You can SMS to request the call, or you can pre-configure it. You might even want it to scan your calendar and decide on it’s own which meetings should be interrupted.

Have asterisk use curl to get a bunch of unrelated data that is of interest to your company and then allow your staff or customers to call a toll-free number for a report read to them.
(b) Report can be tailored to each (type of) caller.
(c) Insert mean gossip about one caller in the other’s report and vice verse.
(d) Call each caller by a first name, but make it someone else’s name.

I used Asterisk to create an auto dialer to play recorded messages about local soccer pickup games. It also captures information from the callee to see if they plan on attending and how many guests they are bringing.

Listen to your local sports radio station on your cell phone in realtime. I thought “I have free minutes all weekend long and am missing football games while traveling.” Radio earphone jack to line input on Asterisk box to confrence call. Now my friends and I can dial in to the conference call and listen to the game from anywhere. We can nominate one of ourselves to be the commentator or I can turn off their inbound audio for a cleaner sound with more people listening.

Win a sweet web contest voip-supply based on knowing only of asterisk’s existance.

Actually, a real sweet thing you can do is setup panic buttons throughout a retirement community which calls 911 and plays back a prerecorded message with all the location details of that phone, and then puts the call on speakerphone.

Thanks to asterisk I can be called using local numbers by my girlfriend, family and friends in 3 different countries (US, UK, Slovakia) with call arriving to my voip enabled N95 either by SIP (over wifi) or when not available as a regular GSM call. Neat…

With Asterisk we can at last build the perfect global communications and automation system without borders and no need spend so many years for wire ring and the many witch are missing all the time from the poor country’s in the world ,using Internet ,wireless ,WI-FI ,satellite communications ,and non conventional electrical energy.
Thats not a dream any time can be done .Lets start to create this.
Best regards Sándor Szövérfy

With Asterisk we can at last build the perfect global communications and automation system without borders and no need spend so many years for wire install , and the money which are missing all the time from the poor country’s in the world ,using Internet ,wireless ,WI-FI ,satellite communications ,and non conventional electrical energy.
Thats not a dream any time can be done .
Best regards Sándor Szövérfy
PS:sorry for mistake

Be able to call in to our asterisk system and look up their vehicle and find all of the technical service bulletins from AllData, then read them back to the customer then allow them to talk to a service writer to schedule a fix for that problem.

Have asterisk run local shell scripts to allow remote system administration via phone, such as reboot the server, run “w” and read the logged in usernames, speak the uptime and load average, speak CPU and motherboard temperatures, etc.

Use Asterisk to record votes for anything ranging from national talent shows to local civic elections or plebiscites. Could even keep track of past voters to only allow one vote per calling phone number. On in the case of elections require the voter to enter a PIN from a mailed out voting card.

For an on site service company, use asterisk to automatically call your customers the day before their scheduled appointment and remind them that you will be coming to their house. The system could even give them the option to confirm the time or be connected to a representative to reschedule.

On an IVR key-sequence, Asterisk will dial my unlimited-incoming mobile phone number and provide me with an outside line where I can dial cheap local or long-distance over a VOIP carrier of my choice. I no longer have to use minutes from my mobile carrier.

We had to setup temp phone service to a remote site via wireless point to point connections. From that location we fed bandwidth for internet usage and VOIP phone usage back to our main datacenter almost 75 miles all via wireless to tis site.

Built on licensed and unlicensed wireless spectrum we had no problems and the customers are happy that they can run credit card service as well as take phone calls at thier event.

Spy on my dog at home by alsa channel, microphone and hifi system over mobile phone. Unfortunatly, my dog is clever and did not recognize my orders over mobile phone. So he barks continuously front of the door

a mixed Voip – GPS solution to mantain contact with all your employes ;)… where is the comment button?… oh! the post comment button dont appear on Opera!! may a call using asterisk can solve it! hahaha

xml, xml-rpc, the ability to still use plain text (INI) files, better core, software based conference, dial out from conference, conf bridge, GPLv3 only, so i don’t have to give my credits to digium, and they can still sell it as free/libre/open source, all the FS features.

i have use asterisk to develop several content providing service like songmail a call is places to the asterisk server, a welcome prompt is played and you are also prompt to supply a song code that you want to send to a friend listen to it and also accept the person number you want to send the song to there is a an AGI script that does all the background processes, send the song id to the receiver the receiver dial in an AGI script is called perform all the process of checking the validity of the number and if its valid it play the song then hang up, if not it play a sorry prompt.
i have also use asterisk to pick content from our linus content server. when the user request for a content the dailplan call an AGI script which in turn take in the parameters and forward it to the content server platform which in turn pick the content and sent to to our sms gateway that deliver the content to the subscribers mobile phone.
develop different real life question and answer where you call the asterisk server it will randomly pick a question for you and also instruct you on how to answer the question if you get the right answer it will congratulate you if not it will tell you play a sorry prompt. just to mention few

Asterisk; It’s only because of Asterisk due to which we can see too many Telecommunication companies working the way they want to.

The best part of asterisk is that you can work and mold it the way you want to.

You don’t have to purchase additional module every time, like you do with Cisco and others.

In addition to this you don’t have to pay any thing and just start by installing it and this in turn will benefit people who are starting the company and not very confident about success plus the Teen Age Geeks who use asterisk for projects can pursue their projects to real world.

– Asterisk server with ISDN.
– SQL Replication from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Asterisk.
– The customer has about 1500 companies registered in the database and has a salesperson for each company coupled with the companies contacts.

When a client calls to my customer the number is automatically looked up in the CRM database. When it finds the salesperson that is connected to the client it will connect the client to the right person.

I am busy with a TAPI connection between NAV and Asterisk, this is almost done.

Configured a cron job for asterisk to call an ATA configured to auto-answer calls at pre-designated break/lunch times. The ATA is wired to a legacy Bogen PA system and broadcasts pre-recorded sounds and relevant messages at scheduled times.

Setup a Lab Company to allow patients and doctors to call in and get data from SQL database. They can get data like lab results (after authentication via SS and patient number, pulled from SQL) and account balances. They can even pay their balances automated via TClink (trustcommerce). It also call patients and their Doctors when Lab results are done to notify them.

I use Asterisk for a Televote, the caller-id is insert in Mysql and a graphic system for Real time use a query. The Graphic system send the data on air in a television station. The graphic grow with every call

setup unlimited cell phone plan for yourself or ‘frends’, then ‘test’ the limits of unlimited cel world gateway.

There are unlimited plans eg family, xbil to xbil etc . You couple two phone on the plan one to air one to Asterisk. If you want be not limited to single company set up pair of phones to each mobile company. The coupling required some electronics so when one phone rings the other phone get on and transfer – enter the number. savings are > 5. The Asterisk part is used simplify the design. Phone number portability complicate somehow the solution since the prefixes are now not predictable.

Although this contest is over, a lot of what I do is mentioned already – colourlisting (black, white, grey, red, known void, for example) being one of them, I have also implemented a “call both” method and a “working from home” flag that stops my extension ringing other than on some numbers I have defined as “work” numbers but doesn’t affect my partner.

We’ve set up Asterisk in apartment buildings, leveraging the economy of scale to provide VoIP to the residents. ATAs are connected to * as extensions. Each apartment has it’s own DID, which is cheap! The apartment leasing offices are tied to the same system, and makes for easy communication- just dial 8 plus the apartment number to connect. Late notices can be automated with TTS, etc. Voice mail to email notification is a real perk to the tenants, etc… It provides additional revenue streams to the building owners, while saving the tenants $.. Win win!

I developed a billing system for prepaid cards with asterisk with many extras like: callerID recognizing, speed dialing, 2 languages (EN & BG), info system, and many more. Probably the best feature of my instalation – our customers can call to Google talk accounts. Also I have a GSM gateway based on extras in 1.6 beta version.

Hi
All the guys who comment on this subject are really Great. all opnion shows As per requirements & application we can use Asterisk. it means Asterisk useful as core or lead component of the system.
combi or inconnected system can possible with Asterisk.

Limit the number of tries to call to a number on the Asterisk server with a context in extensions.conf of just 25 lines of asterisk script. After trying the max times (f.i. 5 times within the last hour) the call is routed in a special way (Hangup() or Festival(“don’t call again we won’t call you”) )

The queue assistant saves you money an a lot of annoyence because of the lousy music on hold during log waiting times. Just send qa -your phone number- -number with the long queues lousy moh and long waiting times- to meetmecall@gtalk.com and your phone wil ring when the other side has been anwered by a flesh and blood agent.

We would like to share with you one interesting model for the use of the PBX Asterisk. To be more precise, the main idea is to use the Asterisk as a platform for the development of telecommunication services. With its open source software and API, the Asterisk can bring the development of telecommunication services down to a simpler process of Web programming thus considerably lowering “the entrance barrier” for those involving in the programming of new services.
We propose to integrate a new component (proxy) into the Asterisk platform. The main functionality of the proxy is to translate telecommunication calls into HTTP requests to external web services. Telecommunication services are located separately from the PBX, while the information they receive from Asterisk is presented as a HTTP-request. Technically, HTTP GET/POST request is a request, in which external telecommunications service passed information about the subscriber’s name – CallerIdName, caller’s number – CallerIdNumber and and called number – Extension. Upon receiving necessary parameters, such as (calling/called number) a web service produces and forwards its instructions to the proxy. The latter receives and translates them into Asterisk instructions. The development of such services under the architecture described above is similar to a conventional CGI-script, for which there is a plenty of programming tools. As a result a programmer doesn’t need to be familiar with the Asterisk API.

Asterisk can read our mail using Flite and MailCall and send it by fax to some one else with hylafax, inform by SMS to that person that a fax or e mail as been send to him, all that we can do´it using voice commands with LumenVox. This way we can manage or office with a phone call while we are driving or traveling.

Turn asterisk into Inventory Manager for any retail store or small stores. When the quantity of the goods reaches a threshold limit Asterisk system will wake and call the Store manager or Owner about the inventory status.

We bought an Asterisk VPS server and it came with Elastix on it. We learned alot with that and soon we upgraded to a dedicated server and deployed our entire request line, live caller dial in system using Asterisk. This is the most flexable Radio station telephone system ever! Other radio stations are asking us where they can buy our system or something similar, I told them “I dunno” lol.

Use: In health care for clinics and doctors.
We are using asterix for recording doctor notes which are then transcribed in a back office and uploaded back to Amazon S3 via an automated parser script that updates metadata in the DB via secure APIs that we expose.

Automated call reminders to patients for appointments. The app is very stable – good work guys!

I’ve used asterisk to setup a GSM-VOIP gateway which includes tethering my asterisk server via bluetooth to my gsm phone. That way inbound calls can be routed to aspecific contest in the dialplan and do lots of cool stuff.